Print madness

First, a reminder. Abe and I will be at the Jet City Comic Show (Seattle, WA) in just under a couple weeks! We will have a ton of stuff and would love you to come by and say hello. We are at booth AA68. It is September 24, Saturday, from 10-6 at the Seattle Exhibition Hall. We have been working hard getting ready.

What a busy weekend. On Saturday, Abe and I went up to Bellingham to print lots of stuff at my mom’s place, Egress Studio Press. But lucky us, we got to spend a couple hours driving around Seattle first looking for paper. Office Depot and Staples only carry paper that is too light-weight. So Paper Zone was the winner, even though it was heavier paper than we really wanted (28 lb. instead of 24lb.).

During this time driving around, we had to leave early and so stopped in at Starbucks for breakfast. I got a pumpkin scone and Awake tea because that is always what I get. Abe got coffee, which is a change for him in the last few weeks, and his usual cranberry scone. Their scones are actually good now, by the way. Anyways, the tea was too hot still when we got to Staples, so I wasn’t drinking it and forgot it in the car. When we got back to the car, Nisa had pulled it out of the cup holder and poured the whole thing out on my seat so she could drink it! Fortunately, there is a great drive-thru coffee, Gourmet Latte, place right next to Staples and Office Depot (which are across the street from each other) so I got another tea and the dogs, even idiot Nisa, got dog treats.

After all our driving around and drink buying, we eventually got up to Bellingham and started working away. I was a bit of a task master, but boy was it worth it. First up, my mom took pictures of Abe and me! It was hilarious. They have been put to good use, but I think they will have other uses as well. We had fun and were all laughing our heads off.

Then we ran upstairs to the computer. The first thing we worked on, because it was the last requirement for the Jet City Comic Show: Posters! We have one for The Jerks and one for Flying Dodo Publications. I am so glad she helped us because even though The Jerks poster was complete, we replaced some of the hand-written text with a font and it looks amazing. And she helped us with our Flying Dodo Publications poster and it could not look better. It is covered in a bunch of variations on the flying dodo, like this one, my favorite, called “Big Butt, Skinny Jeans.”

Poster for The Jerks

Poster for Flying Dodo Publications

Now we finally have a saleable copy of Ooh! Shiny. Lovely goldenrod cover (the image does not do it justice). Japanese stab binding. I am still binding it, but as of this posting, 10 of the 100 books are complete. Japanese stab binding is so much fun. The first 100 copies have a hand-written dedication, but any after will have a printed dedication. After printing all theOoh! Shiny papers, Abe ran downstairs with them all and folded them in half.

Cover of "Ooh! Shiny"

Title page of "Ooh! Shiny"

Abe had to fold a lot of paper

We also finished The Fire Breather, which I did all the watercolor paintings for on the Labor Day weekend. Great fun. It is a small book, but full color.  I will post more about this on it’s own, but I am pretty dang pleased with it.

Just look at it all! Pages for "The Fire Breather" and "Ooh! Shiny"

The second to last thing we worked on was Fart Happens, the collection of the first year of The Jerks comics! It looks great! I am really excited for this. It is by far the biggest book we have done: 60 pages. We did not have time to print it, but my mom will bring it down this weekend. Abe did the layout and did a great job. I can’t believe how much he has learned about layout this summer. He is going to do great in his Publishing Arts program this coming year.

Finally, but not really, we made up a couple prints: Secrets (a Gertrude comic), and Two Birds on a Wire. So excited. We should have at least 5 different prints available at the Jet City Comic Show. Two Birds looks Great. They are huge prints on glossy paper.

Then for reals finally, we ran downstairs at 11:00 in the evening to cut up all the Ooh! Shiny and Fire Breather papers (two sets of pages printed per paper). We didn’t even leave until 11:30, so we sadly missed out on ice cream with my mom and Jim.

A couple days later, Monday, I got in the car at 6:30 in the morning to head to work. As soon as I opened the door, it smelled like something died in there. I sent Abe a panicked text, but I was running late, so I got in and drove to work. It smelled just as bad if not worse when I finished work. I forgot: I put milk in my tea and it was still apparently spilled in the back seat. Mostly on a blanket, so this evening, we put it in the wash and doused the tea spots in Febreeze. Dead animal and Febreeze go great together, let me tell you.

Production on Oooh! Shiny

Ooh, Shiny! is my (Angela’s) linocut story about the triumph of crows to gain access to a wondrous torn garbage bag. Let’s follow through this gallery of pictures. (I used the gallery because I am not sure how else to get the pictures in here.)

1. The printing press. My mom let me use her printing press, which was an absolute life-saver. I did 8 copies of 14 separate pages. I could only get 3 to 4 pages completed in one day so I had to go up for 4 weekends just for printing.

2. Inking setup. I roll the ink on the glass. To the right of that is the papers I am using to print on.

3. The eight pages of the last run.

4. The fresh linocut for the next page. I cut it a month or two before.

5. Rolling out the ink. This can take a while. You don’t want to get too much ink on the linocut. But you also don’t want to get to little. The trick is, as my mom showed me, that you roll it out until it looks like velvet. Once I figured out how to do this better, I could do an extra run of prints each day.

6. Rolling out the ink on the linocut. Those dense areas of solid black are hard to get enough ink on without getting too much ink on the smaller areas like the panel border.

7. The fully inked linocut. Waiting. Though I shouldn’t let it wait to long.

8. The linocut set in the template on the press. I cut (well, my mom did) a template that was the average sized paper (they are all different sizes because they are hand-ripped and the original papers were different sizes). Then that template gets taped to the press board. When the linocut is inked, I put the linocut in the template. The linocut and template are backwards to the paper. So instead of having the extra border on the left for the book, it is on the right.

9. This is a test copy, which you can tell because I don’t have a white cotton glove on my left hand. For the test, I just used newsprint. For the real ones, I used the white glove because my hands were covered in ink and the paper needs to stay clean clean clean. (also, my shirt says “Yarrrrn.” I love it).

10. Rolling the press. I roll it through and then back again. Simple.

11. Finished test print.

12. Covering up the real prints from the last batch with newsprint in preparation to put the next print batch on top. The news print is to keep it all clean.

Much thanks to my mom because she showed me or told me how to do the whole process and let me use her studio for so many weekends where Abe and I ate up all her time. She helped us print many more copies of our comics in preparation for the comic conventions.

When Ooh, Shiny! is ready we will have some videos to post. And before that we should have some photos of the book binding to post. With that one, we will also try to include some great photos of my mom’s beautiful studio I got to use.